be folded into a hearty hug.
“Merope’s daughter,” Grandpa explained to the ladies across her head.
“Oh, I remember!” said the lady Hayley could see out of her left eye. She wore a gown the blue of hyacinths and she had two deep dimples when she smiled. “Merope got into trouble for marrying a mortal, didn’t she?”
“And so did the mortal, poor fellow,” Grandpa said. He swung Hayley round into the crook of his left arm. “This one in blue,” he told her, “is your aunt Arethusa, and the one in green is your aunt Hespere. That one with the flute is Aigley and the one with the sistrum is Hesperethusa. Erytheia is our string player. If you want to talk about them all together, you call them the Hesperides.”
Hayley looked from one to the other of these five pretty ladies. There was a strong family likeness between them all, although Arethusa was fair and rounded and Erytheia thin and dark, with the others in between in various ways. They were each wearing a different coloured gown and all smiled at Hayley as if they were delighted to meet her. So many aunts! Hayley thought. Oh, I understand! This is Grandpa’s other family that he goes to see. “Now I’ve got nine aunts!” she said wonderingly.
“Well, actually you’ve got eleven really,” Grandpa said. “There are seven of the Pleiades, you know. There must be two you haven’t met yet.”
“Oh, yes. There’s Harmony and Troy’s mother,” Hayley remembered. “None of them is as beautiful as you,” she said to the five new aunts.
They laughed, and laughed again when Grandad protested, “Oh, I don’t know! Alcyone is quite a looker, don’t you think? Even Maia could be if she tried. And Asterope would be prettiest of all if she wasn’t such a mouse. I love and admire all my daughters, Hayley.” Then he turned a little stern and asked, “Now what are you doing here? Did you just wander along, or did you come for a reason?”
“We were wondering that too,” said Hespere, the one in green.
“For a reason,” Hayley said. “For Harmony’s game. I have to bring back a golden apple from the Garden of the Hesperides. That’s from you, isn’t it?”
The new aunts looked at one another and then at Grandpa, anxiously. “That’s not as easy as you’d think,” said Arethusa, the one in blue. “We’d give you an apple, gladly, if it was only up to us.”
Aigley, the flute player, who wore a dress like a daffodil, explained, “The apple trees are very well guarded, you see, by a dragon called Ladon.”
“And they all belong to the king,” Erytheia said, propping her banjo-like instrument against the garden seat, “who knows exactly how many apples there are.”
“You, Grandpa?” Hayley asked hopefully. “Are you king here?”
Grandpa shook his head. “Not me, my love. I’m only a Titan. I’m not that grand.”
Erytheia stood up and straightened her white dress. “I’ll take her to the gate and show her,” she said. “I can advise her at least.”
“I’ll come too,” Hesperethusa said, laying down her rattle.
“Good. Bless you both,” Grandpa said. “Tell her what to do. And come back in one piece, Hayley, even if you have to do it without an apple.” He gave her another hug and pushed her towards her two aunts.
Feeling very nervous now, Hayley set off with Erytheia rippling along in her white dress on one side and Hesperethusa floating gracefully on the other. Hesperethusa’s dress was a lovely blushing pink, like the best kind of sunset. Hayley was sure that, if her aunts had not been there, she would have run away and cheated like Tollie, probably by bringing Harmony the plastic apple she had won on the first day.
But they were there, and they led her among the trees to a tall fence with a tall gate in it. Through its bars there wafted the most intense fragrance of apples – not the dull, cidery scent apples have when they have been picked, but that fresh, living smell apples have when they are ripe but still growing on the tree.
“Now listen, love,” Erytheia said, with her hand on the latch of the gate, “if anything goes wrong, or even starts to go wrong, go at once to the very end of this strand of the mythosphere.”
“Everything hardens off there and turns into stars,” Hesperethusa added. “You’ll probably be a star of some sort yourself out there, but don’t be afraid. Nothing much can hurt our family out at the edge there. Just alter your path a little and go home another way.”
“All right,” Hayley said. Her voice had gone down to a whisper.
Both ladies bent and kissed her. Feeling so nervous that the skin of her stomach tightened and jumped under the nearly healed scratches from her first night in Ireland, Hayley slipped round the gate and in amongst the apple trees. Apples hung all about her, just above the level of her head. They did not look brightly gold. They were more like ordinary apples, with their gold fuzzed over with brown and some red streaks amid the brown. But they were obviously gold, for all that, drooping heavy on the tree, just as they were obviously growing and alive.
This looks too easy! Hayley thought suspiciously. But she stretched up her hand to pick the nearest apple.
“Er – hem!” said the dragon Ladon.
He was coiled round the trunk of that tree. His scales were the same crusty grey as the lichen on the trunk of the tree, which was why Hayley had not seen him up to then.
Hayley froze, with her arm up and her fingers curled round ready to pick the apple, and simply did not dare to move. She hardly dared breathe. She was too scared even to think.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the dragon said. His steamy breath wafted round Hayley as he spoke. It smelt like a wood fire, sooty and woody at once.
Hayley thought she had lost her voice. It took a real effort to whisper, “Please, sir, I need a golden apple.”
“You can’t have one,” said the dragon. “Do you think I’m going to let you loose in the mythosphere with something that precious?” He rolled an eye at her, while his breath coiled up among the leaves of the tree, filling it with fog. Hayley stared at his eye. It was like looking into a far distant sun deep inside a glass ball. “Don’t I know you?” the dragon said, filling the tree with fog again. “A tasty morsel – lots of hair and a body that’s half red?” His long face left the tree trunk and began to stretch out towards Hayley. “Didn’t you come with a friend and steal one of my old scales the other day?” The tip of his nose was nearly on Hayley’s chest by then.
He’s going to eat me! Hayley thought.
The realisation unfroze her mind and she remembered Erytheia’s advice. “Yes, I was there,” she said. She managed to bend her stiff body and jacknife herself away to the outer edge of the mythosphere.
Everywhere was stars suddenly.
At least that meant that the dragon was quite a long way
